Hydrogels can enhance cell and drug therapies by modulating encapsulated cell and drug activity. Injectable hydrogels are particularly relevant in clinical settings since they may be implanted with minimally invasive methods and with minimal prior knowledge of defect site geometry.
Current shear-thinning and injectable hydrogel systems are known to suffer from problems of instability after delivery, described in the literature as bio-erosion, where the gel structures break down with time owing to the longer-term instability of the non-covalent nature of the crosslinking within the shear thinning hydrogels.